


You Never Can Tell

by Raptorlily



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-06 14:47:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13413525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raptorlily/pseuds/Raptorlily
Summary: “Hey to you too, man.” Archie chuckles on the other end of the line and Jug notes that he doesn’t sound too hammered. “You’re at home now?”“No,” Jughead lies, looking around his bedroom. There’s stacks of books on the floor. A bunch of clothes hanging off furniture. He needs to do laundry and probably clean up a bit, but it’s his first night off in what feels like eons and he’s too irritated to care.“Listen, I need you to do me a favor,” Archie says. “Can you come here and pick up Betty?”Some good ol' pining and pre-relationship Bughead set pre-series





	You Never Can Tell

**Author's Note:**

> So grateful to yavannies for all her hard work betaing and her immense encouragement, and to createandconstruct for always shaking her pom poms for me :)

 

The movie is at the part where Vincent and Jules are discussing Marsellus Wallace tossing Antonio out the window when Jughead’s phone chimes. He gives the rectangle of white light on the milkcrate doubling as his night-table a cursory look. It’s _maybe_ within arm’s reach if he stretches, but his laptop is propped up on his knees, his pillow is in the perfect position and frankly, he’s too lazy to care. There are only two people in the world who text him, and this being Saturday and sometime around midnight, Jug’s money is on Archie. He's probably calling for a ride home because he’s too trashed to remember he can call an Uber but too embarrassed to call one of the other ‘friends’ he keeps ditching Jughead for lately.

The phone chimes and buzzes again with another message. Jughead opens a bag of M & M’s and pops a few into his mouth, chewing wrathfully. On screen, Jules and Vincent get in character and bust in on Brett, Marvin and Roger. Jules interrogates Brett about the burger he’s eating.

_‘Big Kahuna Burger. That’s the Hawaiian Burger joint…’_

The phone buzzes once more and this time, 'Smoke on the Water' starts to blare. Two text messages _and_ a phone call.

Wow. Must be _urgent._  

Jughead presses his lips together. He doesn’t look at the phone. Thinks about ignoring it. Knows he _should_ ignore it. He isn’t anyone's obligatory designated driver and he’s no one’s Girl Friday.

But even as he is thinking all this, he hits pause on the movie and already infuriated with himself, snaps to answer: " _What_?" 

“Hey to you too, man.” Archie chuckles on the other end of the line and Jug notes that he doesn’t sound _too_ hammered. “You’re at home now, right?”

“No,” Jughead lies, looking around his bedroom. There’s stacks of books on the floor, clothes hanging off furniture. He needs to do laundry and probably clean up a bit, but it’s his first night off in what feels like eons and he's not going to spend it being responsible. 

“Listen, I need you to do me a favor,” Archie says, and Jughead rolls his eyes, thinking, 'here we go,' except instead of 'I really need a ride, bro,' Archie finishes his request with: “Can you come here and pick up Betty?”

“Betty?” Jughead doesn’t know why that makes him sit upright, but it does. The bag of M & M’s slides out of his lap, a few candies bouncing and skittering off like marbles across the linoleum floor, and he makes a face in frustration. “Why? What’s going on?”

Archie hesitates. “She’s… had a bit. Nothing messy, but I think she’ll need some help getting home.”

There's music and indistinct chatter on the other end, people laughing, and what sounds like Reggie Mantle hollering in the background.

Jughead frowns. Betty isn’t a drinker and she isn’t a party-person either, although he suspects that’s more for fear of her dragoness of a mother than a personal lifestyle choice. Mrs. C must be out of town or the resident girl-next-door has negotiated some other arrangement to skip curfew.

Not that he cares. If Betty Cooper wants to sow a few wild oats and hang with the in-crowd it’s her prerogative and definitely _not_ his problem.

“Why can’t you take her?” he asks. 

Archie chuckles into the phone, a little breathy. A female voice murmurs off the side but it doesn’t sound like it belongs to Betty. There's a pause and that’s all Jughead needs to know.

“Never mind,” he sighs and considers hitting ‘end’ and pretending they got disconnected, but Archie has already voiced his request and Jug isn’t as indifferent to Betty Cooper as he’d like to be. “Where’s Kevin? Polly?”

“Kevin’s on house arrest. His dad caught him rolling reef with Han. Polly went home with Jason. You’re all she’s got.”

Yeah, a regular knight in Pop's paperbag armor. “Not if you be a pal and keep it in your pants tonight.”

“C’mon, Jug.” Archie’s voice is different now; lower, conspiratorial, which means the chick he’s working is probably within earshot. “How many times are you going to watch _Pulp Fiction_?”

“I’m not—” Jughead starts and then looks back at his laptop. He sighs. “Where are you?”

“Streaky’s.”

“That’s in _Midville_.”

“If you leave now, it’s only twenty minutes from Sunnyside.”

“I told you, I’m not h—“

“Yeah, you are, Jug,” Archie interrupts, a self-congratulatory note in his voice for successfully calling him out on his bullshit, and Jug desperately wants to call _him_ out on _his,_ for ditching Betty, for making him drive clear across town just so he can get laid without a guilty conscience, but he bites it all back. Archie is his friend. Alongside Betty, he’s his _only_ friend. Friends are there for one another. Archie would be there for him too, if he could stand to pull his head out of his ass for a hot minute. 

Or at least, he always used to be.

Betty on the other hand... 

“I’ll send you the address,” Archie says. “Text me when you get here.”

Jughead doesn’t say anything. Just hangs up and stares at his phone wondering, irrationally, if maybe that conversation didn’t happen. There about a hundred reasons why he's dreading this. But the phone lights up and chimes less than a minute later when Archie messages him the address.

He slams his laptop closed, clips his wallet to its chain and shoves it into his pocket.

His dad is laid out on the couch with a beer in the den. He looks muddled, his eyes drooping as he stares blankly at an episode of _Married with Children_.

(‘Did you miss me?’ Peg asks. ‘With every bullet so far,’ Al answers and the studio audience erupts into canned laughter).

There’s empty take-out boxes and newspapers littering the coffee table; ash in the ashtray and out of it. The whole room smells like stale yeast, old pizza and wet cigarettes. Jughead’s lip twists in disgust, glad that at least Jellybean isn’t around to see this anymore.

“I’m taking the truck,” he announces, rustling around the mess on the kitchen counter for the keys. He swipes a jean-softened packet of gum on impulse.

“Truck’s with Hatchet. He’s borrowing it for the week.”

Jughead feels his anger from earlier that evening returning. “How are you getting to work tomorrow— _if_ you’re going to work tomorrow?”

“Bike.” FP groans. He shoves his hands into his armpits and nuzzles further into the couch cushion. “Make sure you’re back with it by morning.”

Jughead rolls his eyes. He hates the bike—it always makes him feel like a dork, trying too hard to be hard—but short of strapping a saddle on the Ferguson’s wolfhound next door and high-ho-silvering to save the fair damsel in drunken distress, it’s his only option for transportation. He feels weary. Annoyed. With Archie, with Betty, with his dad, with the whole fucking world. The bike keys are on the hook by the door where they’re supposed to be (the only thing FP ever bothers to keep in order are things to do with the bike) and he grabs them. With one last disappointed glare at his dad, he heads out.

It takes twenty minutes for him to drive to Midville. He guns it on on the back roads as the shadows and trees whip past, the moon chasing after him, before he’s wheeling into the manicured Lake Street neighbourhood, where the houses are half-the-size of Riverdale High, pristine in their upkeep and lit up with soffit and landscape lights and all sorts of upper-middle class bullshit. Some of the driveways are even gated and there’s a fountain in one of the front yards.

On the north side of the street, visible behind some of the homes, Sweetwater Bay ripples black and gleaming in the full moonlight. He pulls over to check the address, and then kills the engine.

Streaky’s house is an intimidating Regina George-esque estate at the end of the street. Its columns are white and the windows are completely dark. The party, according to Archie’s text, is in the boathouse (who in the even fuck owns a _boathouse_?) behind the property so Jughead leads the bike a little out of the ways and heads around to the back with his hands in his pockets.

He hears the music before he sees the place; a proper two-story, A-line affair right on the water, with a double door boat garage, dock and a balcony running on the top-floor. It's ridiculous, really. Both the dock and balcony are littered with people. People drinking, people laughing, people smoking, people tottering around and knocking into paper lanterns and spilling their drinks.

A brunette in tight skinny jeans and a crop top bumps into him on his way up the stairs. The beer slops over the lip of her cup and splatters all over one of his combat boots.

“Watch where you’re going,” she slurs, before missing a step and spilling the rest of her drink all over herself. "Fuck!" she whines, glaring at Jughead. "Look what you made me do--hey, you're kind of cute?" 

Jughead rolls his eyes and moves on. _Jesus._ Is Betty this wasted too?

He hopes not.

At least half of the Riverdale High student body had showed up tonight to make an ass of themselves. Some Top 40 hip hop anthem is pumping through the speakers and the air is a nauseating haze of sweat, weed and keg beer all overlain with a miasma of designer perfume. Where people aren’t gyrating to the music, they're littered all over the couches and chairs, making out sloppily in corners, laughing obnoxiously in small groups, sitting on the floor and passing around a shisha pipe.

In the dining area, Jughead passes Melody Valentine and the rest of the Pussycats playing a drinking game with a few Central High guys and Streaky Shore himself who's channeling Tom Cruise in _Risky Business_.

Jug doesn’t really know any of the Pussycats that well, but he’d partnered with Melody for a science lab last semester and, if he's honest with himself, he finds her less threatening than her bandmates. He hesitates, waiting for her to finish her drink for the boat race, before reaching out to touch her elbow.

“Hey, Melody. I’m looking for Betty or Archie. Have you seen either of them?”

Josie, however, answers for her. “Why the hell you asking her for, Ponyboy?” she snaps, teetering on a sky-high pair of electric blue heels. She sweeps her gaze up and down his lanky form and Jughead mentally stamps ‘encounter imperious high school ice queen’ on his party bingo card. “It’s our one night off. Can’t you see we’re playing a game here?”

“Relax, Josie. It’s just Archie’s little friend,” Valerie declares, throwing a companionable arm around him that proves to be quite difficult as there is nothing actually ‘little’ about Jughead at all. With the other, she shoves a cup of something red and pungently alcoholic into his hands. “Drink, Jug- _head_!” She giggles into his ear. “We need another player for our team!”

Melody throws Jughead an apologetic look as he carefully extracts himself from the Pussycats’ cuddly keyboardist. “I think I saw Betty in the kitchen,” she tells him.

“Thanks,” Jughead says and after a mumbled apology to Josie and Valerie, escapes in the direction indicated.

To his immense relief, his search ends there. Betty is in the kitchen. The crowd milling around the door briefly parts like the Red Sea and he sees her standing behind the island, busily refilling people’s glasses from a large water pitcher. She's dressed in pair of high-waisted jeans and a petal pink crop-top that, despite revealing a decent amount of her arms and décolletage, still understates her somehow. Her hair is piled high into a sweepy updo and she’s done something different with her face even though it doesn't look like she's wearing much makeup.

His heart stutters in his chest when she looks up to see him and her whole manner lights up like someone has plugged her into the wall.

“Juggie!” she exclaims, bounding toward him and a second later, he's pulled into a fiercely happy hug and Jughead stiffens, wondering what the hell it is about alcohol that makes people so _handsy_. He is not a hugger. He does not hug people. And generally, most people don’t want to hug him unless they want to cut themselves on his edges.

Betty Cooper, however, is the one person he retracts his spikes for—on this and on most things, if he is going to be honest with himself—and he hates himself for letting her hang onto him a little longer than he’d normally allow. She smells like cupcakes and the pungent origins of a Sunday morning hangover, her chest soft where its crushed against his.

“I’m so happy you’re here!” She pulls away first, her eyes bright, and his heart gives another happy kick in his chest at the sight of her smile.

“Hey Betts,” he greets as her eyes drop to the cup in his hands.

“Have you had water?” she asks. “Hydration is _so_ important if you're drinking. If you're having alcohol, you have to make sure you're drinking water too. Here.”

She unsteadily pours him a cup of water and thrusts it out under his chin, spilling a little on his shirt from her vigour and, like an idiot, he realizes she's referring to cup of mystery drink still in his hands that Valerie had given him earlier.

“Oh, yeah... this is not mine,” he says, setting it aside on the counter. Betty grasps his arm, her green eyes wide.

“But you have to hydrate!” she insists.

He looks down at her hand on his bicep (and resists the sudden urge to flex) and then back up to meet her gaze.

“Betty,” he says patiently. “Have you been taking care of everyone else and giving them water but forgetting to drink some yourself?”

“Um. It _may_ be a tiny possibility?”

Jughead shakes his head. It is such a Betty thing to do; even when drunk out of her gourd, her first instinct is to think of everyone and forget about herself.

Still, he can't help the squiggle of disappointment from worming through him at seeing her like this. Glassy-eyed, her movements thick and exaggerated. 

In the next room, someone gives a loud whoop and the crowd around the drinking game table obnoxiously erupts into round of shouts and celebrations. Someone turns up the music louder and the bassline makes the dishes in the cupboard clink and vibrate.

Jug rolls his eyes. This is about the time of night when everyone gets stupid.

“Here.” He hands Betty his cup of water and then pours another and hands that one to her too. “Chug both of these and let’s get the hell out of here.”

He takes a hold of her elbow and with his other hand, he thumbs in a text Archie that they're leaving but they're stopped short at the entrance to the kitchen by Reggie Mantle leaning on the doorway.

“Hold up, Morticia. Where do you think you’re taking her?”

Jughead drops his phone hand to the side, lolling his head in annoyance. He cycles through a stack of equally sarcastic things he can say in response before he clacks his teeth together. Reggie is built like a brick shithouse and he is an obnoxious asshole on a good day. And right now, he's loaded and probably looking for an excuse to fight.

“I’m taking Betty home, Reg,” Jug decides to take the diplomatic route. The way this night was going already, he’ll find another hill to die on soon enough. “She’s not feeling well.”

“No, I'm not.” Betty's brows beetle together and she looks back and forth between the boys, seemingly oblivious to the elevated levels of testosterone in the air. “I’m feeling fine! And I don’t want to go home now, Juggie. I want to dance!”

Jughead's eyes slide shut and he resists the impulse to pinch the bridge of his nose. 

“See ‘ _Juggie_ ’?” Reggie's smirk is dagger sharp. “The lady wants to stay and dance.”

He then turns to her and gallantly holds out his hands in invitation. Betty smiles indulgently in return. She flutters her eyelashes up at him, and just when Jughead swears he's about to witness these two drunken idiots re-enact the ballroom scene from _Beauty and the Beast_ right there in the kitchen, Betty primly places both of her water cups in Reggie’s open hands instead, surprising everybody.

“Thanks, Reggie!” She bounces on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek before looping her arm through one of Jughead’s. “Let’s go, Jug! I love this song!”

Now, normally Jughead’s official policy on dancing is ‘ _fuck, no_ ,’ but given that Reggie’s gobsmacked expression in that moment is everything Jug has ever wanted framed on his wall, he decides to make an exception. He waggles his brows at Reggie, flashing him a shit-eating grin and allows himself to be led away.

Apparently, whoever wrestled their turn at the playlist tonight really likes their throwbacks. Joe Budden’s ‘Fire’ is blasting through the speakers and most of the people in the living room are up and dancing. Or what passes for dancing. To Jughead, it looks a whole lot like sweaty flailing and grinding.

Betty drags him into the middle of the room and twirls back towards him, slipping her arms around his neck as easily as if they’d done this a hundred times before.

“C’mon!” she shouts at him over the din. The crowd seems to push closer against them, and then a bit away, as if they’re all breathing and jumping together. “Let’s dance, Jug! I don’t think we’ve ever danced together before!”

“That’s because I _don’t_ dance,” Jughead shouts back. “I could maybe twitch on a good day.”

He is feeling particularly twitchy right now. Betty is swaying her hips to the beat, dangerously close to his, and his skin burns wherever she touches him. The front of her top has slipped slightly lower than it was before and he can see a pale pink bow between the two generous curves of flesh and it takes concentration to keep his gaze from crawling back down for a fourth and fifth look.

Oblivious, Betty shimmies even closer.

“At least put your hands on my waist, you dork,” she complains and then laughs a little when she stumbles on the step out. “C’mon, Jug. Do you want me to dance with Reggie?”

She flicks her gaze over to where Reggie is scowling at them and then cocks a brow at Jughead in challenge. He fights the urge to gulp. As much as he’d like to stick it to Reggie, and pretend for a second that this counts for something, her warmth and proximity and poisonous coconut scent is making him feel a little delirious.

When he makes no move to do as she asks, Betty rolls her eyes and puts his hands onto her hips. "Like this," she says, and awards him with a wink when he concedes to stepping closer. 

As they fall into an awkward two-step, Jughead realizes that, if he wants to, he can control how close or how fast they rock together and the way Betty is responding to him, he gets the impression there is little to which she’d object. Jesus. No wonder Archie wanted him to come take her home. He's stone cold sober and he's her friend and even _he's_ getting ideas.

Betty cants her chin at him and gifts him with a slow, bone-melting smile that pushes some blood downward. Her eyes are glazed over and dreamy and he sees them drop to his lips.

… Drunk. Betty Cooper is _definitely_ drunk.

Jughead sighs and takes her gently by the wrists, sliding them from his shoulders.

“Come on, Betts. Let’s go home.”

“But you said you’d dance,” she protests, firmly tugging his hands back onto her hips. “And _Archie_ is taking me and Polly home tonight. We can still—“

“No, he’s not, Betty. That’s why I’m here. Polly went home with Jason.”

“Oh.” She falters and her brows bunch together as if it suddenly occurred to her she was missing something. She slides off of him to check her phone (there are several texts from Polly, he can see over her shoulder) and then looks around the room. The music has switched over and the heart-thumping party anthem is now transitioning into a moody slow grind.

She turns back to frown at him. “Where IS Archie?”

“Hey! You made it!” As if summoned, Archie’s bright ginger head bobs into their periphery and Betty and Jughead step back from one another to accommodate him into their circle. Archie claps his hand on the back of Betty's neck and grins at Jughead. “Nice moves! Jug—I didn’t know you could nae-nae!”

“One of my many talents,” Jughead quips, feeling flustered and strangely guilty that Archie would’ve see that (and also, more than a bit annoyed that he and Betty hadn't manage to slip out without running into him).

If Betty seemed unusually happy to see Jughead earlier, it is nothing compared to her buoyant reaction to seeing Archie now. Her smile is practically splitting her face in two and she throws her arms around him like an overly-amorous octopus.

“Archie!” she chirps and Jug's gut twists. Across the room, he spots Reggie talking to an attractive brunette with a nose ring and a tattoo sleeve. He looks up to catch Jug’s eye and raises a plastic red cup in a solemn salute.

 _You win some, you lose some,_ he seems to say and Jughead scowls at him, hating that Mantle just that much more for that insinuation.

“Juggie says you’re not taking me home!” Betty is complaining about him as Archie works to disentangle himself from her embrace. “Why not?”

Archie, to his credit, looks a little sheepish.

“I kind of met someone tonight.” He rubs the back of his neck nervously. “But I didn’t want to leave until I knew you had a way to get home.”

Jughead leans into him to whisper: “Dude, you left her in the kitchen.”

“For like five minutes before you got here,” Archie whispers back. “She took charge in there. I figured she was good.”

Betty, however, is frowning. 

“Who?” she asks. “Whom did you meet?”

Archie briefly turns around to face the group of people talking and bobbing along to the music behind them. He touches the wrist of a young Zoe Saldana look-alike who turns three-quarters of the way and flashes him a Rembrandt smile.   

“Heidi,” Archie says. “Come meet my friends, Jughead Jones and Betty Cooper. Guys, this is Heidi Maxwell.”

“Hi! Very nice to meet you,” Heidi greets, her accent difficult to place over the bumping hip-hop. She holds out a slim hand to shake everybody’s. Her wrists are bony and her fingers tipped with bejeweled, baby pink claws that make Jughead think of the scratching posts in the Walmart pet aisle.

“Heidi’s from Amsterdam.” Archie is looking at her like he just can't believe his own dumb luck. “She’s just here for the week visiting her grandparents before heading upstate.”

“I can’t wait to see New York,” Heidi gushes and Jughead thinks that by the end of the week, Archie won't be able to wait for her to see it either.

Betty, on the other hand, probably can't wait for her to go see New York _now_.

He chances a look at her and tries not to wince. Her Stepford cybernetics seem to be malfunctioning, her smile is frozen in place. Even when soused, the politeness is hard-wired in.

“New York is gorgeous in the summer,” she tells Heidi brightly but her eyes say, ‘kill me now.’

Jughead jumps in. “So, uh, Amsterdam. That's in Holland, right? What do they put on French fries in over there? Mayonnaise, right?”

Heidi blinks at him in confusion. “What?”

“It's a a _Pulp Fiction_ reference _,_ ” Betty mutters before either Jughead or Archie can. Her eyes look a little wet. “Excuse me, I have to go the ladies room.”

And before Jughead or anyone else can say anything, she slips away into the crowd.

Heidi raises a brow. Archie looks confused. Jughead wants to kick them both in the shin.

“Me too,” he says quickly, not caring how odd that sounds. “Um, nice meeting you,” he tells Heidi and turns to Archie to give him a couple of slaps on the shoulder that are maybe a little too hard to be friendly. “I'll take care of this. You're off the hook.”

“What?” Archie says, but Jughead is already elbowing his way through the throng of people, following the back of Betty's blonde head. He sees her pause to lift two Jell-o shots from a passing tray and toss them both back before stumbling down the hall toward the back of the house.

 _Shit_ , Jughead thinks, and starts weaving in around people a little more aggressively, reaching her just as another girl is exiting the bathroom and Betty is brushing in past her. He catches the door before she can shut it and slips inside, locking it behind them.

He turns around the same time she does and his stomach plummets at the sight of her. She has her arms wrapped around stomach and she's hunched over, like she's about to crumple in around herself.

“Jug?” she hiccups, and two fat tears slip down her cheeks. “What are you doing?”

“Archie's an idiot,” he tells her. “A huge idiot. In fact, I'm pretty sure he’s the king of all idiots. You're—“

She sweeps towards him and cuts him off with a kiss so forceful and sudden that it knocks him back a step. He hesitates, pulling in a sharp breath through his nose before exhaling and gently pushing her off of him. As soon as her lips leave his, he regrets it.

Betty looks up at him, her eyes wide and confused. Her jaw goes a little slack, before her cheeks turn candy apple red and she turns her back to the wall, sliding down to the tile floor and burying her face in her hands.

“Oh my God, I'm sorry. Juggie, I'm so _sorry._ I'm such a mess.”

And then she's crying.

“It's—it's fine,” Jug stutters. His lips are aflame from they've touched hers (she just kissed him; Betty Cooper just _kissed_ him) and his throat feels like he's swallowed a wad of cotton. Everything in his programming is demanding that he leave, _leave now_ before everything goes to the pits, but a few, unsteady breaths serve to remind him that Betty isn't in her right mind and he still has to take her home somehow.

“It's ok, Betts. You're trashed. You're not thinking straight. I'm not going to hold it against you.”

“ _I'm_ the idiot,” she sobs. “We start getting a bit more flirty and I get my stupid hopes up and he invites me to this party and my mom is out of town and everything starts lining up perfectly like it’s destiny or something, and I think maybe tonight we're going to have our moment—maybe he's going to see me in a different light, finally—and then something like _this_ always happens. It's like he _knows_ and he's doing it on purpose.”

Jughead hands Betty the roll of toilet paper. “Do you really believe that?” he asks her gently. He knows that Archie can be a jerk sometimes, but his jerkiness usually comes from a place of selfishness and negligence rather than malicious scheming, and he usually rights his course after things are explained to him. Of course, it's aggravating to explain things to him that are obvious and shouldn't require explaining in the first place, but...

“No,” she blows her nose. “But just once I wished he'd notice that I'm a girl too. He hasn't ever, has he?”

She looks up at Jug searchingly. Even with clumps of mascara under puffy eyes and a nose rubbed raw from tissues, she's still looks like somebody's teenage dream. 

“We don't talk about you like that,” Jughead tells her, and that's the God honest truth. As oblivious as Archie is, some things—like the fact that their childhood friend suddenly looks as if she's taken to hiding grapefruits under her sweaters—are impossible _not_ to notice. “But honestly, Betts, if Arch were interested, you really wouldn't have to ask. That kid's about as subtle as a fart in a library.”

That startles a huff of laughter out of her. “Yeah, he warmed up to _Heidi_ real quick.” She tosses her tissue into the toilet and she sighs. “It's weird. Sometimes, I think I should tell him. But then, sometimes it's like, I forget that I'm supposed to have this stupid crush, and things are normal for a while. “

Jughead's brows furrow in confusion. “Sometimes you _forget_...?”

Betty's lips part as if she's about to answer, but a loud rapping on the door startles them both.

“Finish dicking elsewhere, horndogs!” A female voice calls from the other side. “Some of us need to pee!”

“Just a goddamn second!” Jughead hollers back. Flames lick up the side of his neck at what that seems to imply, and he glances back at Betty, who too, has gone Barbie pink. “Everyone's wasted,” he assures her. “C'mon. Pop's is open. Let's get some greasy food in you, Coop.”

“Ok,” Betty says shyly. “I just need to, um...”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

He leaves to let her about her business, and runs into Ginger Lopez, who glares at him when he shuts the door and holds the handle before she can reach for it.

“Not what it looks like,” he says, eyeing her and the other two Cheryl Blossom cronies standing behind her with their phones out mistrustfully. “Just comforting a friend.”

The girls all exchange looks™.

"Saw you two dancing," Tina Patel says. "Was that comforting a friend too?" 

"Poor Betty Cooper," Kim Wong laments with a sigh. "Always in the _friend_ zone." 

They hear the toilet flush and the sink run, and the door opens and Betty appears. She's fixed her hair and her smile is a little broken but it's a smile nonetheless. His heart gives a flip.

“Ready?” Jughead asks and lets her slide passed him, following after her without giving the other girls a second look. 

 _Wasted_ , he reminds himself.  _Everyone is wasted and doesn't have a clue what they're saying or doing._

Having Betty Cooper hanging onto his arm as he leads them out of the party and up the grassy hill, he feels a little intoxicated too. 

**Author's Note:**

> Before anyone asks, _Make It Work_ is being worked on as well. :)
> 
> Feedback is always appreciated. Please and thank you!


End file.
